The argumentum ad hypocrisem

UPDATED 5/4/2006 as a result of good comments; see end of post.

The previous post was meant to be just an introductory paragraph to this one, but took on a life of its own. Still, you should certainly read the previous one before you read this one, as this one sort of assumes that you understand the point of the previous one.

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In the last few years, a particular variant of the argumentum ad hominem has begun growing in popularity among the Left. This particular variant is so common in modern leftist rhetoric that it deserves its own name, and therefore I have begun referring to it as the argumentum ad hypocrisem. It is flawed in several ways, but we can think of the different errors as variations on two basic flaws in logic and one (rather ironic) flaw in morals. The errors in reasoning lie in a perverse definition of the term hypocrisy and in the fallacy of bifurcation. The moral failure is, amusingly, hypocrisy itself.

If we strip the argument of the rhetorical fog with which it is usually surrounded, we see that it works like this: a person (we’ll call him The Jerk), whom I wish to abhor and to whom I wish to consider myself morally superior, has done something that other people admire, and I don’t think my chances of convincing them that the action itself was evil, are very good. I therefore implicitly concede to them that the action itself might well be good in the abstract, but I argue that that very same action, when done by The Jerk, is evil and abhorrent, because he is a “hypocrite.” Setting the logical steps out step-by-step, I proceed as follows: ...continue reading...

Premise #1: An action is only good when done by a good person. (An alternative way to express the same premise: if a bad person does a good thing, the action’s good nature does not improve the bad person; instead, the bad person’s evil nature pollutes the action.)

Implied (but NEVER openly expressed) Premise #2: there are only two kinds of people: evil people, and the ones whose behavior not only is perfectly self-consistent now, but has always been so.

Definition #1: Any person whose behavior is inconsistent, is a “hypocrite.”

Conclusion #1: All actions performed by “hypocrites” are evil actions.

Premise #3: If the action The Jerk is said to have taken, would be the right thing for a moral person to do, then the opposite behavior must be evil, and vice versa.

Premise #4: The Jerk has, in the past, often done the opposite.

Conclusion #2: Either what The Jerk did in the past was evil, or else his more recent behavior is evil.

Corollary #1 to Conclusion #2: The Jerk’s behavior is inconsistent, i.e., he is a “hypocrite.”

Corollary #2 to Corollary #1: Either what The Jerk has just done is evil per se, or else what The Jerk has just done is evil because it was done by a hypocrite.

Final Conclusion: I may safely abhor The Jerk because whether the thing he has just done was intrinsically evil or not – indeed, even if it would, if done by anyone else, have been admirable – I can use it to prove that he is evil: if the act is evil per se then obviously it proves his evil nature, while if the act is good per se then such behavior is inconsistent from his previous evil behavior and thus he is evil, because “hypocritical.”

Note that while the person making this argument starts out by pretending that he is talking about the action, his true purpose all along is the condemnation of The Jerk.

The problems with this argument are probably obvious, but I’ll go ahead and spell them out anyway.

1. Fallacy of bifurcation. The fallacy of bifurcation arises whenever you falsely pretend that there are only two possibilities, disprove one of them, and claim that you have therefore proved the alternative. Implied Premise #2 is a perfect example. One must be very ignorant indeed of human nature – or else willfully blind to the humanity of the person whom you target when you use this argument – not to understand that human nature is both frail and reformable, and that therefore there is practically nobody in the world who is “good” by the standards of Premise #2, even though most people in the world are not “evil” in the sense required by the argument.

A. People sometimes figure out that the way they have lived in the past was foolish or immoral, and they change. When you try to say that a man’s past must be held inflexibly to determine his present character, with no willingness to recognize the possibility of enlightenment and/or repentance, you choose to stand with Inspector Javert in his implacable persecution of Jean Valjean. (For the victims of the American public school system, I should mention that this is not a good thing, and should further recommend any good abridged version of Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s famous novelization of a pretty decent musical.)

B. As I said above, people are flighty things, buffeted about by emotions and confusion and ignorance and stress, etc., and so it is a tricky thing to pass judgment on their character even if you know them well personally. And this is especially true when looking at how they have responded when faced with nasty complex problems to which there are no easy answers (and if you don’t think that, for example, “What should we do about the Middle East and Islamist terrorists and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?” falls into the no-easy-answer category, then you’re too much of a fool for any sane person to waste a moment’s conversation on).

2. Perverse definition of the term hypocrite.

The argument depends on taking the cultural revulsion attached emotively to the term hypocrite, and seeking to associate that revulsion with “people who do not behave the same way all the time.” But in point of fact, the reason the term evokes revulsion, is that a “hypocrite” has historically been somebody who meets the following criteria: (a) he claims to be morally superior to other people, and (b) in order to support that claim, he pretends not to be guilty of sins that he in fact commits and for which he blames others. The hypocrite, in other words, cares very much about looking morally superior to others, and he attempts to prop up his claim by pretending not to be guilty of the things he attacks others for doing.

It is not hypocrisy to say that it’s evil to engage in activities that you yourself freely admit to having carried out in the past. In fact it’s not even hypocrisy to say that it’s evil to engage in behaviors that you yourself still occasionally engage in – as long as you freely admit that you yourself are guilty, and as long as you agree that it’s just as bad for you to behave that way as it would be for anybody else. Hypocrisy is not about inconsistency. It is about pretense.

Therefore the evidence that purports to show that The Jerk is a "hypocrite," does nothing of the sort, unless the term "hypocrite" is defined perversely-- and defining the term perversely is precisely what the person wielding the argumentum ad hypocrisem implicitly does.

It is worth observing that the focus of the hypocrite is on reputations and the moral judgment of himself and other people, not on virtue and the nature of right and wrong. To put it another way, the hypocrite is not really interested in what is the best thing to do. He is interested in who is the best person, and he intends to make sure you know that it’s him.

In short, the hypocrite lives in a judgmental world. The milder form merely wishes to do what he wants to do but still wants judgmental people to think he is a good person, and therefore he seeks to hide his bad behavior lest he be judged. The more common, and more serious, hypocrite, wants to be able to congratulate himself on his own moral superiority to others, and therefore he seeks to hide his bad behavior from himself and others lest the illusion of moral superiority be shattered.

Among other things, let’s say that two people are discussing a controversial action (such as the coalition’s invasion of Iraq, or whether it is appropriate to multitask by sucking up to a none-too-bright Congressman on the phone while a none-too-bright intern is, um – well, moving right along...). When we understand clearly what hypocrisy really is, it becomes apparent that if one of the people in the conversation is interested in what ought to have been done, while the other is interested in whether the President is an evil bastard, the second is much more likely to engage in hypocrisy than the first, because hypocrisy is a temptation primarily to those whose passion is the judging of other people.

3. The intrinsic hypocrisy of the argument.

The argument itself has, as its purpose, the demonstration of my moral superiority to The Jerk. Thus I claim to be morally superior to somebody else, which is the first half of hypocrisy. But my complaint is that he does not behave with perfect consistency in all situations, and in particular that if I go far enough back into his past I will find things that he did then that do not match what he’s done very recently – and, assuming that I’m human, the same thing is almost certainly true of me. The standard that I appeal to in invoking the argumentum ad hypocrisem, is a standard that practically nobody can live up to – and that includes me, unless I’m a saint who lives perfectly to my own highest standards consistently and whose mind is so closed to new information that none of my ideas ever change.

Indeed, it is a standard that nobody ought to live up to. If your behavior in the past has been evil, then to remain true to your past today, is to behave despicably today. When a man does what is right, he ought not to be condemned for it.

Even if we hate him and are desperately seeking an excuse for his condemnation.

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A final point: there's an excellent example of the argumentum ad hypocrisem here, the same commentor expanding further on his remarks here. This being the double-oughts rather than the '90's, the Hateful President du jour is George W. Bush (though Hillary Rodham Clinton can certainly bring out the bile from the other side of the aisle); and thus on the Left, if Dubya is mentioned at all, then the judgmentalism tends to kick in. Commenter Craig uses a form of the argument that is particularly common among the anti-American crowd: he mixes in with the argumentum ad hypocrisem an enthusiastic and all-pervasive use of the fallacy of hypostasization: the "hypocrite" in this case is not even an actual individual, but is a hypostatic "America," and much of the alleged "hypocrisy" really simply reduces to the fact that different Presidents at different times have different policies. The abstract "America" is "proved" to be a hypocrite, and this is taken to prove that Dubya's invasion into Iraq was the decision of an evil man.

Furthermore, the same comment makes heavy use of a rhetorical tactic I've also been meaning to post about: the faux corporate confession, which makes use of (again) the fallacy of hypostasization so that Craig can "confess" to "our" sins when what he's really doing is accusing people he detests of doing things that we are all meant to understand Craig himself would never do. At every point where he says "we," you can replace it with the much more accurate "those bastards," because that's what he really means -- since he himself has of course not the slightest impact on America's foreign policy and bears no actual personal responsibility for the actions of people, and indeed (as he is at pains to imply) he has never so much granted his assent to them. He "confesses" that "we" (meaning "they") are evil, as a way of reaffirming that he personally is their moral superior. It's a childish and transparent tactic, but an extremely common one.

And don't even get me started on the special pleading.

So basically, it's a very remarkable comment, an instructive and (for those of us with uncharitable senses of humor) highly amusing compendium of folly. But let me urge you (especially those of you who are conservative Republicans and therefore will yourself be tempted to take pleasure in Craig's bad behavior -- "those stupid, judgmental Democrats and their Bush Derangement Syndrome, they're just so deliciously pitiful") to remember that there are a whole bunch of people who are off the deep end about Dubya but are quite nice and likable people as long as the conversational Pavlovian bell never rings. Craig uses an argument that is intrinsically hypocritical, irrational and judgmental. It does not follow that he is himself under normal circumstances any of those things.

UPDATE: I don't mean to imply that the argumentum ad hypocrisem is the exclusive domain of the Left. An excellent example of the tactic would be many conservatives' delighted observation that Teddy Kennedy long ago made a couple of extremely strongly pro-life statements back in the day before Roe v. Wade.

I also certainly do think that you can accuse a man of hypocrisy if his positions change, as long as you can show evidence that his positions were changing not because his actual opinions were changing but because he was playing some sort of game. I suppose you could make a case for that with John Kerry. Even so, I never felt that Kerry was hypocritical so much as that he just was a hopelessly incoherent pseudo-thinker who had never been able to muster the intellectual effort to ever actually figure out what his own principles and opinions were. That is, stuff like "I voted for it before I voted against it," struck not as hypocritical nearly so much as just plain ol' stupid.

In order to wield the appeal to hypocrisy, it just seems to me that you have to claim so much understanding of somebody else's motives -- perhaps the most difficult thing in the world truly to understand -- that your burden of proof is just too high to reach most of the time. But that doesn't keep people from trying.